Insider Business (May 7, 2023) – Nigeria grows 63 million metric tons of cassava (also known as yucca) every year, but most of the country’s supply is eaten locally as fufu or garri. Experts say Nigeria could be missing out on billions in exports of lucrative cassava products like bubble tea pearls, starch, or ethanol.
Video timeline: 0:00 Intro 1:48 History of cassava 2:58 Growing issues 5:42: How garri and fufu are made 6:54 Transportation issues 7:36 How cassava is processed 10:06 Global demand is so high for cassava
Challenges along the country’s entire supply chain have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in cassava spoilage. But one entrepreneur, Yemisi Iranloye, thinks she has the solution. She’s introduced higher-yielding seed varieties and moved processing plants closer to farms.
Now, her farmers earn four times more for their product, and her cassava starch and sorbitol have landed her clients like Nestle and Unilever. Could Yemisi’s model be the way for Nigeria to feed itself and cash in on exports?
Bud Light is the latest casualty in a battle over whether companies are embracing too many progressive goals on everything from gender identity to climate change. What’s at stake as companies fight back.
Everyone is talking about Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic. Now, the drugs are poised to go from conversation starters to profit makers.
An industry reckoning over carbon credits could refresh the market for renewables derived from things such as cooking oil and cow manure. These beaten-down stocks that could get a lift once headwinds subside.
Monocle Films (May 4, 2023) – Located in the north-western corner of the Scottish Highlands, Gairloch is a coastal village of about 700 people that known for its mountains, sea loch and rugged landscape.
Monocle paid a visit to Two Lochs, reportedly Britain’s smallest commercial radio station, which is nestled on Gairloch’s shores, run by a handful of volunteers and has built a loyal fan-base of global listeners.
“People 50 and older hold the vast majority of wealth in the country, but we’re producing products and services for people who don’t have nearly as much money to spend…”
by Alexander Gelfand
April 27, 2023: Thanks to advances in medicine and public health, people are living longer, healthier lives. The world’s population of people 60 and older is growing five times faster than the population as a whole. Global life expectancy has doubled since 1900, and experts say that children born in developed countries now have a good chance of living to 100.
A “silver tsunami” is already sweeping the U.S. labor force: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 36% of people ages 65–69 will remain on the job in 2024 — up significantly from the 22% who were working in 1994.
These longer-lived, longer-working individuals generate an ever-bigger slice of global GDP and control an expanding tranche of global wealth. In her recent book Stage (Not Age), Golden estimates that the “longevity economy” is worth more than $22 trillion — $8.3 trillion in the United States alone.
That may be a conservative figure: AARP (the organization formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons) estimates that people over 50 already account for half of consumer spending worldwide, or $35 trillion. (This range of figures may have to do with how “older adult” is defined: The term is variously used to refer to people over the ages of 65, 60, or — sorry, Gen Xers — 50.)
CNBC (April 25, 2023) – Americans are collectively spending nearly $65 billion on sneaky fees, according to the White House. “It really seems like companies have become addicted to junk fees,” Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, told CNBC.
Junk fees are making companies billions of dollars richer. Watch the video above to learn more about where junk fees hide, details of proposed changes, where policy may fall short and whether increased regulatory oversight may be enough to squash junk fees once and for all. Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 1:26 Defining ‘junk’ fees 5:34 Squashing fees 7:52 Policy problems 10:02 The future of fees
Insider Business (April 21, 2023) – For generations, farmers in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir have been selling their crops on the Dal Lake in a floating market. The lake is an economic hub for people living there – with many working in agriculture, fishing, and tourism. But decades of pollution have threatened their livelihoods.
The floating vegetable market on Dal Lake is in Srinagar, Kashmir, where locals trade out of their canoes. The produce sold here is grown in floating gardens.. The rich ecosystem of this wetland produces plenty of tomatoes, cucumbers, water chestnuts and the famous nadru (lotus roots, a delicacy in the Kashmir Valley).
They gather in the centre of the lake at dawn, and disappear just as sunlight hits the waters.
Insider Business (April 4, 2023) – Purple flowers in Kashmir produce the world’s most expensive spice — saffron. While it can sell for $10,000 per kilogram, climate change is making it even more expensive. Because of lower-than-usual rainfall over the last few years, production has dropped significantly.
And fields that once yielded this delicate spice have become sites for new housing construction. Climate change is threatening the production of all kinds of foods from cloves in India to eels in Japan and Spain. Here are 10 expensive, and vulnerable, foods and why climate change is making them so much more expensive.
Monocle Films (February 20, 2023) – Peris Costumes is the world’s largest company dedicated to selling and renting costumes for film, stocking more than 10 million garments. Monocle took a peek behind the scenes of its Madrid-based HQ to meet its artisans and see how the industry is booming, thanks to the rise of streaming platforms.
Linde has been making major investments in hydrogen deals, and is increasingly moving into low- or no-carbon production methods. Earnings could take a few years to develop, but now may be a buying opportunity.
0:15 This AI robot is revolutionizing farming – The robot can identify weeds and crops at rate of 20 plants a second. The robot then delivers either weedkiller or fertilizer directly to individual plants to an accuracy of within 1mm. It can treat up to 500,000 plants per hour. The robot was invented by US firm Verdant Robotics.
1:24 This company cancelled all internal meetings – In January, e-commerce platform Shopify cancelled all regular meetings with 3 people or more and imposed a 2-week window before staff could schedule anything new. It also permanently banned meetings on Wednesdays and limited large meetings to a strict window on Thursdays. More organizations are trying a ‘meeting reset’, from Dropbox to Asana and Zapier. But why – and could your organization try it too?
3:00 How to build a thriving workplace – Businesses often ask staff why they resign. So why not ask why they’re joining or staying? “Why would you wait until people have already committed to walk out the door to say, ‘If only I had a time machine, I would go back to the past and convince you to stay’? What I would much rather see employers do are entry interviews and stay interviews. Entry interview is just asking the same questions you would normally pose at exit at the beginning of the employment relationship: Why are you here? What are you hoping to learn? Right. What are some of the best projects you’ve worked on? Tell me about the worst boss you’ve ever had so we can try to emulate the good and avoid the bad.”
5:22 ChatGPT is already being used for scientific research – ChatGPT launched to the public in November 2022. It gives in-depth, natural language answers to prompts, based on what it has learned from a huge database of books and articles. People have been using ChatGPT to perform an impressive range of tasks, from writing university-level essays to debugging code and filling in job applications. It has written fake scientific reports that have fooled scientists and has even been used to write a children’s book.
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